It's the middle of the week, it's time to unwind a little, so let's take a stroll back up the spike-lined paths of Celeste mountain, but this time as Kirby. Ingeste, by EX.ULT VIDEOTAINMENT is a free, browser-friendly mod of the original Celeste for Pico-8 starring HAL Laborotory's famously friend-shaped pink puffball. It's a cute little subversion of a Matt Thorson's tough platformer, letting you float…

I hope you didn’t have anything planned this week, because speedrunning extravaganza Awesome Games Done Quick starts today at 4:30pm GMT. If you’ve never tuned in before, AGDQ is a weeklong, 24/7 marathon of games, all played as fast as possible, while streaming on Twitch and raising a whole shedload of cash for the Prevent Cancer Foundation. What’s not to like?

The doors have been opened, the games inside have been devoured, and now it's time to recycle the cardboard. Below you'll find all of our picks for the best PC games of 2018, gathered together in a single post for easy reading.

It’s been a pretty stinking great year for indie games. We’ve seen the release of several long-hyped darlings (finally) as well as a few surprise hits that went on to dominate newsfeeds. You easily could have missed them, though, what with all the big budget map fest games making huge waves this year. I know there are about a million games demanding your attention right…

﻿ Look out. The year 2018 is going down in a storm. There are hundreds of games aboard, running, jumping, trying their best to survive the maelstrom. But there’s only one tiny lifeboat, and only enough room for three games. It falls on the sorry shoulders of the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, to decide which trio of games clamber onto the life raft…

We're just about halfway through 2018 (which has somehow taken both too long and no time at all). As is tradition, we've shaken our our brains around to see which games from the last six months still make our neurons fizzle with delight. Then we wrote about them here, in this big list feature that you're reading right now this second. And what games they…

Bit nippy in here, isn’t it? Let’s throw another game on the fire and warm ourselves with some electro-soup. Yes, it’s the RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show, and this week we’re talking about freezing cold city-builder Frostpunk. Katharine lost a third of her people to cold when she forgot to turn the heat on, while Brendan dug up his society’s dead because he "needed…

The awards ceremony at this year’s GDC was fun. At least, that’s what John told me from his seat in the crowd, where he saw the winners mount a stage some would consider too colourful for this planet. The Independent Games Festival Awards and subsequent Game Developer’s Choice Awards saw a range of trophy-grabbers, from indie students to adventure game veterans. Unfortunately for them, I…

This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they underwent to make the best bits of their games. This time, mountain-climbing platformer Celeste and the importance of timing in its movements and kindness in its code. Early last month, the makers of Celeste released the source code behind the game’s star, Madeline. Across 5472 lines and in variables like…

Rad trash mammal simulator Night In The Woods scooped this year's Grand Prize during the 2018 Independent Games Festival Awards at the Game Developers Conference last night, also lifting the award for Excellence In Narrative. Baba Is You, an upcoming puzzle game about shifting words to change how parts of the levels and game work, also picked up two awards. Looking across all the winners,…

The makers of Celeste have shared a big slab of the platformer's code, letting everyone dig down into the intricacies of its movement. "Maybe it'll interest you if you're curious how some part of that works!" game director Matt Thorson said. Given how secretive the games industry can be, it's nice to see a game with such great-feeling movement spill its guts for all to…

From a publisher as huge as Ubisoft, and in a series as chart-dominating as Assassin’s Creed's Discovery Tour represents an unusual and welcome ambition. The mode, available as free DLC for Assassin’s Creed Origins or as a standalone game, strips out all the combat, levelling-up and collectibles in favour of a promised educational experience. It takes the strongest facet of Origins – its detailed and…

No. Let's not be ridiculous. But there are so many examples of bad survival games that it’s important to remember the good ones. So that’s what we are doing on the latest RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show. We're breaking stones over the heads of rubbish survival games, but cooking, salting and eating the delicious ones. Adam wraps himself up in The Long Dark but…

You're climbing a mountain. It's hard, especially when the wind is cutting through you like a knife and angry spikes are pulsing from the walls. Sometimes you're not even sure if the mountain is actually a metaphor for every difficult thing you've ever done in your life. That's how much trouble you're having getting to the peak. That is my brief summary of Celeste, a…

As someone who recently spent 10 days trekking through the French Alps while trying to figure out what to do with my life, I think I can empathise with Madeline. She's the main character in Celeste, the upcoming platformer from the Towerfall devs which releases on January 26th. Madeline sets out to climb Celeste Mountain for reasons unknown - though I reckon it's got something…

It’s Brendan hour at RPS. Everybody else has gone to bed and I’m left on sentry duty, which means I get to make posts which are seemingly about colourful-yet-hardcore mountain-climbing platformers called Celeste [official site] which Graham really likes but on closer inspection are actually a grave and terrible insight into my own fragile and harrowed psyche as it tumbles silently into a dark and…

Celeste [official site] is simple enough. It's a platformer about climbing a mountain in which you can jump, air-dash to clear larger gaps, wall jump, and hold down right-trigger on the controller to cling to vertical surfaces until your stamina runs out. You leap between platforms, you avoid the spikes, and it's all very pleasant. That's how it begins, anyway. By the time I reached…

TowerFall creator Matt Thorson has announced his next game, a mountain-climbing platformer named Celeste [official site]. Together with Noel Berry, he's "re-imagining" the wee prototype they made last year in only four days - which you can still play online. Unlike the local multiplayer murder madness of TowerFall, Celeste looks like quite a chill - though certainly not easy - solo adventure.